Hair today, oil spill-stopper tomorrow

You can brush it, snip it, dye it, braid it, grow it out into a luxurious 'do or shave it off in an attempt to pre-empt the indignities of balding.

But even the most creatively coiffed Jersey girl might be stunned at what environmentalists and a blooming coalition of salons and other businesses are doing with hair now.

They're using it to clean up the oil spill defiling the Gulf of Mexico.

In the Lehigh Valley and elsewhere, hair stylists are bagging clippings left over from haircuts. Pet groomers and others are bundling together fur left over from cats and dogs. They're sending it to the Gulf so volunteers there can stuff it into old nylons that sit in the water and collect oil -- hair booms.

''There's not really much else you can do from Pennsylvania,'' said Rayne Reitnauer, owner of the Cold Nose Lodge canine day care in Alburtis, where workers are collecting dog hair to fight the oil slick. ''So it was nice to find out a way other than just sending dollars.''

''I think it's cool,'' said Alex Rice of Nazareth, who went for a haircut Tuesday at the patrick mcivor color studio in Hanover Township, Northampton County, and found out his stray locks were bound for the Gulf. ''It's good to know it's being put to use for something.''

The hair collections are being organized on behalf of Matter of Trust, a San Francisco-based environmental group that's been turning leftover hair into oil ''booms'' for years to help fight spills.

A spokeswoman for the group did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday, but the organization's website said it started collecting hair well before the Gulf disaster to help mitigate the impact of an estimated 2,600 smaller oil spills each year.

So why hair?

The website explains it this way:

''Why should millions of pounds of absorbent, natural, renewable fiber go to waste every day?

''We all get it. We shampoo because hair collects oil.''

Patrick McIvor, who runs the Hanover hair salon where Rice was trimmed and another one in Allentown, said he and his employees have long looked for ways to recycle their products and reuse the hair left over after their scissors stop.

They've collected hair to make wigs for children with cancer, for instance.

McIvor's operations director, Lindsay Taylor, found out about Matter of Trust's program last year. Since then, McIvor said, he and his employees have collected several thickly packed 30-gallon trash bags stuffed with old hair to donate.

While McIvor and his staff have been gathering hair for months, he said people are more receptive to the idea since a BP oil rig exploded last month, killing several workers and unleashing a torrent of oil into the Gulf.

''Before, if you said you were collecting hair for an oil spill, people [assumed] you were a hippie,'' he said. ''Now if you collect hair for an oil spill, you're a good neighbor.''

Other salons only recently learned of the hair collection efforts because of the attention paid to the Gulf spill.

Cindy Costa, a senior stylist at Fantastic Sams in Bethlehem, said a co-worker found out about the campaign via Facebook. The salon began filling a trash can this week with hair clippings.

''We could have been saving this hair all along and never knew,'' Costa said.

Collecting the hair isn't only good for the environment along the Gulf Coast, supporters of the program say.

Jennifer Gallagher, grooming salon manager at the Petco in the South Mall along the Allentown-Salisbury Township border, said workers there normally throw out leftover pet hair after grooming.

Now they're gathering it all into boxes so it can be donated to fight the oil spill.

''What better way to recycle?'' she said. ''It's our pet's hair that we don't want in our house.ÃÂÃÂ I think it's an awesome idea.''